School District of Philadelphia

Keith Busby, Executive Director for IT Security,
School District of Philadelphia

The School District of Philadelphia is the eighth-largest public school district in the United States, with more than 134,000 students and more than 18,000 staff. They face continually growing needs for network security, federally-mandated web filtering, and compliance reporting. The district stretched its dollars by deploying a highly virtualized server environment and by adding more than 50,000 Chromebooks, but these new technologies overwhelmed the legacy firewall.

After a live production test that evaluated performance and capabilities of alternative NGFW solutions in their environment, the district migrated to a combination of virtual and physical FortiGate firewalls for its virtual server network, integrating it with VMWare NSX to enable advanced, layer 4 to layer 7 policy enforcement and protection for distributed, east-west application workloads and storage. Benefits include an upper-six-figure annual savings by retiring a web-proxy solution and over 500 hours saved annually in security administration.